In a retail environment, it is advantageous to display merchandise in such a way that it is easy for a customer to both visually identify and retrieve a desired product from the shelf upon which the product is stored and displayed. Retail stores commonly display their products in a vertically standing display rack or related assembly known as gondola shelving. In one popular form, gondola shelving is assembled in a back-to-back configuration such that customer aisles are formed to permit the display of merchandise on both sides of the aisle. Such display configurations are beneficial in that they can be installed to define a variety of floor plan configurations. A further advantage of gondola shelving assemblies is that they may be used in both refrigerated and non-refrigerated display racks.
A typical gondola shelving assembly includes cantilevered shelves that are secured to a generally upright rigid backing through horizontally-spaced vertical standards that include periodically-spaced slots that can accept a rearwardly-protruding detent that is formed in the back of the individual shelves. Conventional gondola structures (including the shelving) require considerable time to assemble, and once assembled, their fixed construction makes it difficult to reconfigure them to accommodate different types of merchandise. For example, once the shelves are mounted to the standards, the spacing between vertically adjacent shelves is fixed, often to a height greater than that of the product being displayed as well as to any additional distance required to lift the bottom of the product container over the stop. Such a configuration is undesirable, as it decreases the merchandise “packout”, defined as the density of merchandise being displayed within a fixed space.
Gondola shelves are commonly sloped toward the customer in a downward direction so that the product is biased by gravity toward the lower forward edge to facilitate consumer access. Such a configuration is known as gravity feed shelving. The gravity feed configuration ensures that once the forwardmost product is removed from the track in the shelf, the remaining containers in that track slide forward under the force of gravity until the next one in line encounters a lip, stop, or related device placed at the front of the shelf to prevent the container from falling out. Another feature of gondola shelving is that the individual shelves are commonly divided into numerous parallel tracks or channels with dividers between them so that the product is partitioned into orderly columns that extend from the back of the shelf to the front. In some circumstances, the placement of the dividers is determined by the shelf manufacturer which may result in inefficient storage and display of the product. In other circumstances, the dividers are adjustably mounted to the shelves using predetermined divider spacing increments (for example, one eighth of an inch). While this latter configuration provides additional flexibility over the fixed variety, they typically necessitate complicated attachment mechanisms, making it difficult to remove and reattach the dividers to the shelf in situations where the retailer may want to reconfigure the display.
Insofar as such dividers may be adjustable, their connection to manufacturer-dictated lateral spacing does not permit incremental variations in shelf or divider placement to accommodate a particular merchandise package. Moreover, many dividers employ inferior material (for example, breakable plastic), making them unsuitable for heavy products, such as detergent, fabric softener, soda bottles or the like. Furthermore, there is no ability to rotate or pivot the shelves about a horizontal axis when mounted which reduces the retailer's ability to accommodate merchandise made from non-standard or different packaging size, as well as to place tall merchandise packages between vertically-adjacent shelves.
As such, there exists a need for shelving for a gravity feed gondola system that avoids the shortcomings of conventional shelving. There further exists a need for such shelving that can be retrofitted onto existing gondola systems so that a user of the system can take advantage of as much existing gondola infrastructure as possible.